Monday, March 3, 2014

As must be ridiculously obvious by now, one of my great loves is abandoning my chores, er, going out for a walk on the weekend with my camera gear. Although we are deeply in a horrid drought, the last ten days or so brought us a couple of needed inches of rainfall. Most of our early spring stalwarts of the wildflowers are playing shy, but I found that if you stop looking for the big showy blooms and peek at the tiny ones, you can find some pretty interesting flowers.

This is the only one I've been able to identify so far: It's Draba verna, common name Whitlow Grass. I found about a one foot square mound of it near the Chowchilla on Saturday. About 1.5 to 2 inches in height, the blooms were about 1/4 inch long.

One of the varieties of popcorn flower - there aren't very many this year.

Mountain Violet - oh I do love a yellow flower.

Baby Blue Eyes - one of my favorites. I found a decent number of these on our Northwest Territory and Dino reports he saw a bunch in their usual spot on the sandy area by the river.

We are: Praying Horse (yours truly) and The Dinosaur (husband of the Horse).

We have a 128-acre ranch in a little valley in the Sierra foothills which we share with oaks, birds and horses. We were finally able to leave the Bay Area behind and move here full time in August 2009, oh blessed event! We are surrounded by wildlife of both the four-legged variety - coyotes, deer, bobcats, foxes, wild pigs, racoons, skunks - and of the feathered type.